Sunday, 17 November 2013

But Religion Has Nothing To Do With It: Minarets are Political Symbols

As to the decision by Switzerland to ban minarets, I would like first of all to
say that, in my years as a correspondent from Jerusalem, I had to bear the
Muezzin’s call from a nearby mosque every night at 4 a.m., much before the cock
crow. And nor far away from him came many other similar voices. However, I
never thought that the Muezzin had to be silent. In his village, he does not
sing to be heard also from me, but to call his followers to pray. This is religious
freedom and Jerusalem
gives it to everybody. Thinking that, down there, he was trying to convey a
political message in addition to a religious one would mean to go well beyond
what is legitimate for a person who is democratic, liberal and respectful of
other people’s culture and religion.

Actually, except for some pathological cases, Islamophobia is an invention
of the U.N. Indeed, in 2004, the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan officially
defined it as the cause of frustration for many Muslims, without mentioning the
rampant jihad and other huge problems. In fact, in most countries of origin
and abroad, the official Islam has not accepted the universal declaration of
human rights. But it has responded with other initiatives such as the Cairo
Declaration, which states that “anyone
has the right to support what is right and to warn against what is wrong and
evil in line with the Islamic Sharia”.

The ultimate reason that led the Swiss to say no to
new minarets is not poor respect for religious freedom. It is not even the loss
of identity that is driving us – erroneously – to ask for the cross on our
flag. It has nothing to do with this. There are many simple reasons of
diffidence that prevent from wishing for the expansion of Islam. Nor should we
imagine that this choice invites the Muslim to embrace extremism. There are
indeed other reasons behind jihadism – that is fed only by itself and by its
unflinching decision to convert the world. The Swiss watch the TV and are
concerned: the Sharia leads to death sentences, to the hanging of homosexuals,
to stoning people to death. In general, Islamic countries are ruled by dictatorships,
the dissidents suffer, they die. The Christians are persecuted, let alone the
Jews. The groups and the countries that cry their faith louder are also the
most evident ones: certainly both Ahmadinejad's Iran and the Hezbollah, or
Hamas or Al Qaida, represent negative, terrorist models.

Of course, the Islam is not all like this. But, let
us talk about it. Let us thoroughly examine the problems without being accused
of Islamophobia; we have a problem, either we solve it by looking at the
Islamic immigration in its eyes, or soon this concern will turn into rejection.
And the idea that the true Islam is elsewhere with respect to jihad is not
able to placate these fears within the public opinion: there are few and
rare instances in which a brave Islamic voice speaks to guarantee the respect
for democracy, sexuality, converted individuals, dissidents. It is the
politically correct denial that makes jihad prosper: in Switzerland, after the arrest of eight people
who allegedly collaborated to some suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia,
the reaction of the head of a local Muslim group was that “the problem is
not the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, but the intesification of
Islamophobia”. In the USA,
the same happened after the FortHood incident.

It is forbidden to laugh for some cartoons that talk
about Islam. It is forbidden to deal with the terrifying oppression of women,
it is disgraceful to stress that there is an evident identification between the
Islam and totalitarian regimes. It is horrible to raise the issue of honor
killing, polygamy and of disfiguring women with acid that push us back in time
(yes, many of these episodes result from tribal and not by religious habits,
but please let us look at the geographical and sociological distribution of
these episodes) and especially it is generic to speak about jihad... And then,
since whatever is concrete is forbidden, the reaction is against the symbols of
the Islam.

There are millions of mosques without minarets in Islamic countries. But if
they are built close to churches, they are taller, more proud and powerful. The
construction of an Islamic place of worship has a series of explicit secular
meanings that always reiterate the holy competition of the Islam to conquer the
world. Many mosques have been built on ancient Jewish and Christian temples.

A revolt against the politically correct on the Islam may occur anywhere and
the trigger will not be religious intolerance: it does not belong to us or to Switzerland or to Europe.